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The Debate, by Ed Lark

PART THE FIRST: In Which the Guests are Be-Summoned

WHEN I had again grown torpid with ancient wines and myriad food and flesh, and when my mind began to grumble at my haunches for their indolence, I called for my fleetest rider and snuggled two tremendous wax-sealed envelopes into his turquoise-studded saddlebag. He mounted my thoroughbred and rode leg-chillingly fast to issue the Be-Summons which for eras had magnetised the globe's truly fearsome debaters to my splendid though lopsided castle.

I called two great, dead scholars to debate with me. I felt plumply expert in the chosen field, and saw no reason why I would not again be fêted as the most sublimely voluminous and explosively absorbing debater the world has ever seen. The Be-Summons ran so:

Worthiest boozers, disengage from palaver! Venture to my lands and castle for learned and swifting debate! Be as glad as a king's dick! Succumb to my overall cleverness.
The debate shall be:
Is Pessimism A Sin?
Bring learning and courage and your gullet!

My coruscatingly peaked fame ensured that I need not sign the notes, nor specify time for the event. I cogitated in my hexagonal rose garden, jousted undefeatably with my better captains, and waited for signs of my messenger. Soonly, the horse returned alone, clutching two envelopes in its teeth, and I perceived my mistake in seating the man upon my own beast which, standing twice times twenty foxes of tall, is an unruly mount.

Later, warm with wine in the vaulted massiveness of my polyglot library, I flicked a blue glass knife beneath the terse fold of the first envelope. Inside was a note from the Italian author and chemist Primo Levi:

Dear Sir,
I happily accept your invitation and look forward to our discussion. I have a long wait for a train connection and may be delayed. However, I will strive to be punctual.
I am writing to you from my study in Turin. It is Winter 1973.
Primo

Haunching sideways in the stout, baronial capaciousness of my excellent figwood chair, I detonated pheasant-reeking farts and flicked a letter expertly out from the second envelope. It was from the French novelist Gustave Flaubert.

Sir!
Your mail finds me in robust and offensive mood. Though I despise locomotion of any sort, I will leave my retreat and come to your land. Your debate, though facile, may prove amusing.
Prepare your larder and mind; I will eat your food and drink your wine and shower you in wisdom's effluence. I write from my family house in Croisset, Normandy. It is May 1848.
Gustave

I re-read the letters, rejoiced corpulently to myself, then summoned Ur, my most officious and egg-headed scribe, charging him to ponder and lean through all the castle's books to better understand the nature of my prestigious guests. I wished to know their lives and characters and works, so as to predict and out-witticise their mouthings in the coming debate.

PART THE SECOND: In Which the Be-Summoned Guests are Ur-Scribed

IN the early morning, after the hour of my elephant wrestling, I bad Ur to sit in the elk-rib rocking chair and tell what he had learned of my coming guests. Ur began to orate in his thorough-making if weedy style, "My lord, I will begin with the Frenchman who has a moustache. I will quote from his letters.

"'You are quite right to say that New Year's Day is stupid.' So wrote a precociously morbid Flaubert in January 1831, at the age of nine years and one month.

"Then, almost sixteen, he feels able to write that civilisation is a 'Shrivelled abortion of human aspirations'. By seventeen, he has 'reached the point of looking upon the world as a spectacle to be laughed at'. He asks, 'What has the world to do with me?'

"This misanthropic miserablism was, I wager, indistinguishable from the obscure nervous disease which, at twenty three, curtailed his days as a Paris student lawyer, instead resting him in his family's large, newly-purchased country house. It was in this house that Flaubert now spent his time; reading, writing, smoking his pipe.

"It is true that he travelled to Paris quite often, walked in Brittany; ventured to Persia and Athens and Rhodes; but it was in the white study that looked out onto the River Seine, where he belonged.

"While his coevals progressed, becoming men of public office and ambition, Flaubert sat in his chair and retained his adolescent hatred of compromise and etiquette and the shallow mores of society. Left for years to brew his loathing into books, he worked by the fire and looked at the trees, and no doubt fondly, with slow pleasure, and with unsurpassable artistic commitment, Flaubert found things disgusting."

Ur began to whisper, "We must be careful. Flaubert will be pessimistic, but if loathing were all there were to him, then you would not perhaps have contacted him, and he certainly would not have replied. The Flaubert who is coming to debate is twenty seven, he can be exuberant, candid, sentimental, coarse, witty, and warm." "Excellent Ur!" I bounded, "What a clean little shitter you are."

Ur cleared his throat, "Thank you Lord. There is Levi also, who wears a beard."

I gestured roundly with my unprecedentedly dextrous hands, and he Urated, "In 1943, aged twenty four, Primo Levi joined a band of anti-fascist partisans living in the hills above his native Turin. He was captured and detained, and along with six hundred and fifty other Jews, pushed together in twelve rail wagons, and moved to the concentration camps of Auschwitz in Poland.

"He spent almost one year in the camp of Monowitz Buna before the arrival of Russian troops in January 1945. The words 'Work Makes Free' were written above the camp's gateway; in Levi's rare case this became true. His university training as an industrial chemist saved him. While his contemporaries died in the ovens or the mud, the clean and warm conditions within the camp's laboratory, and the opportunities it offered for pilfering barterable materials, kept Levi strong enough to return.

"And when he did return to his family after an incomprehensible ordeal, like Flaubert, he turned to writing to help him live. In 1958, Levi published If This Is A Man, a forensic replication of the concentration camp universe in which he had starved and lived in weakness and horror.

"The book was written to satisfy an 'immediate and violent impulse', to tell his story to 'the rest', to make 'the rest' participate in it. Levi recalled the structure of violence in the camp with steadfast lucidity, so that we would know of it. In a poem which begins the book, he writes:

Meditate that this came about:
I commend these words to you.
Carve them in your hearts
At home, in the street, Going to bed, rising:
Repeat them to your children,
Or may your house fall apart,
May illness impede you,
May your children turn their faces from you.

Ur lowered his voice, "We must be careful. Levi will attack pessimism, will say it is dangerous. But although he never succumbed to 'the bestial vice of hatred', he could neither forget nor forgive the violation of his life. The Primo Levi who is coming to dinner is fifty four years old. He is gentle and slow; but unforgiving and flinty, dark also."

Ur nodded post-oratorically.

"Ur, you have been dromedarially useful. As useful, almost, as I would have been in your scuffed and unmoded trousering."

"Thank you Lord. May I be permitted to say something?"

"Permits? Pah! Speak, Ur!"

"You have very skilled opponents this year. Giants, in their way."

I leaned impeccably left, pinging the udder of my private llama to release warm and cleverising milk into my serpentine goblet, and I belched towards Ur so as to maximate the velocity of his exitage from my library of neural supremacy. He was right. They were good: giants.

But am I not a giant also? Have I not stolen the bells from Notre Dame and drowned half of Paris in my piss? Have I not eaten six pilgrims in a salad? Extracted the quintessence of life's mysteries through botanic and alchemic malarking? Established monasteries of nob-curling beauty and sense? Have I not read more books than have actually been written? Have I not achieved world mastery in almost three thousand and nineteen boardgames, including The Hunchback Courtier, Rush Bundles, The Shrovetide Ox and Shit-In-His-Beard?

The name of your opponent and host, gentlemen, is Gargantua, and I count only one man above me - my creator and Lord, François Rabelais; monk, physician, scholar; author of the most good-tempered and compendious book in all the worlds, The Most Fearsome Life of The Great Gargantua. It was from Rabelais' incomparable book that my vinous and gouty magnificence emerged in 1534, and it is to him, and to him alone, that my tumultuous excellence defers.

PART THE THIRD: In Which the Be-Summoned Guests Arrive

ON the day of the debate I rose cockerel-tiringly early, wafted from my enviable though higgledy castle and swished among the people of my land, offering them rare windows of supplication at the pert feet of my dogged munificence. I stood in the dawning fields and ordered my thoughts with the acute sheepdog of my sensibility, the plump wheat itself singing to me in gold-stalked canticle. And later, as the seventeen hundred and one purple bearded mages of the College of Utter Impartiality took their judges' seats in my implausibly appropriate debating chamber, I sat upon my willing throne of young living doves and waited for the arrival of Levi and Flaubert.

The entrance doors of burnished Martian wood parted in sail-like elegance, choreographed courtiers bowed with haunting synchronicity, and Primo Levi walked straight-makingly towards my hovering seatage with a ruthless though casual punctuality. A fatiguingly grey twill suit buffed about his shouldering, and a brown lambswool jumper sat adjectivelessly beneath it. I saw a symmetrical snugness of silk zinging beneath the suede texturing of his beard, and stolid ovaloid spectacles harmonising with the prudent brownness of his shoeing as he moved into proximity with my cooing rest.

"Lord Gargantua, I am honoured to meet you. For many years I have admired your scurrilous wit, and the omnivorous vitality of your thinking. I decided to bring you no gift. I knew that your natural generosity would have you reciprocate any offering tenfold, and so whatever I gave would be more costly to you than the nothing which I offer."

As I nodded and purred towards Levi, the bogglingly erudite scribe Ur slotted the chemist into the plumed gorgeousness of a fanatically comfortable bespoke debating throne, and the doors smoothed open in accordance with the entrance of Flaubert. A frothy, hammock-contoured moustache prospered twiningly across a lower tract of the Frenchman's face, exciting greater staringness than the velveteened swards of his waistcoat. The jowl-leavingly abundant moustache strolled down the boulevards of his cheeks, crenellating wispily towards his neck, and so fracturing the overall potatoness of his head's shape.

"Sir! You look so serious in your throne! But serious men are comical and stupid. Surely that is not you. You look as stupid in your throne as a priest may look at the altar. Come down! That's better. So? When shall we debate?"

PART THE FOURTH: In Which the Debate is Ur-Scribed

MERELY eighty six years after their arrival in my immaculate if askew castle, Primo and Gustave listened to the scribe Ur hush the millions of supplicants in my Eastern feasting domes and relate in his thorough-making if weedy style the tale of his Lord's victory in the debate, Is Pessimism A Sin?

Ur first told of the contribution of Flaubert to the great debate, "The Frenchman defined pessimism as a belief that the worst outcome would prevail; then stated that a simple appeal to human experience would prove that the worst outcome, would, did, indeed must prevail.

"To demonstrate the inevitability of pessimism, Flaubert sketched the career of human life: born crying in another's blood; whisked towards disillusionment, physical disintegration and the death of loved ones; culminating in painful, incomprehensible demise.

"To show how such mandatory horrors crowded into each person, Flaubert spoke of his own experiences. He described the strolls he would take with his idiosyncratic Uncle Parain when he was six years-old, which would often take in the brothel districts and the mad houses of Rouen; and he told how he had looked through a hospital window to see flies buzzing around the half-dissected corpse of a young woman. This, he claimed, was a cardinal image of our lives - a young woman ending in grotesque bodily decay; emblematic of the endemic decimation of all beauty, vigour and aspiration.

"He continued, stating that there were no sensible grounds for believing that our callous and visceral fates were redeemed by the existence of a soul, an eternity, or any of the many crude heavens elaborated by deluded buffoons of all ages. He quoted from a letter he himself had written in 1839 at the age of eighteen: 'I can't believe that our bodies made of mud and shit and endowed with instincts more base than those of the hog and the crab-louse can contain anything pure and immaterial, when everything around is so impure and ignoble.'"

"’Life is suffering,’ Flaubert asserted. ‘If the Lord Buddha were here he would tell you this plainly.’ ‘I am here, Gustave.’

‘Ah! Greetings. Do you agree?’

‘Substantially, yes, so far.’

‘Good.’”

Ur continued, "Flaubert gnashed punctiliously and argued that his perspective was a necessary base for any honest thought, adding that what is called pessimism by the herd is not abhorrent but is inevitable, sane and accurate. He declared optimism to be philosophical cowardice perpetrated by negligent, chintz-peddling shopkeepers and the docile owners of over-priced and shoddy restaurants."

Ur next described the contribution of the chemist, "Levi spoke of his friend Alberto, with whom he was in the camp, and with whom he had developed an ecology of trust and reliance which often saved their lives. He told of the occasion on which Alberto upbraided him for his pessimism. In consequence of his work in the Buna laboratory, Levi had been able to scavenge small metal rods, which turned out to be made of the metal cerium, and which he and Alberto hoped to barter somehow for bread within the camp's desperate, clandestine economy. Levi, however, could think of no use for the innocuous rods and grew disheartened.

"Quoting from his short story Cerium, which appears in his book The Periodic Table, Levi said that for Alberto, 'Renunciation, pessimism, discouragement were abominable and culpable... He reproached me: you should never be disheartened, because it is harmful and therefore immoral, almost indecent.'

"Levi explained that Alberto was pleased that the cerium had been stolen. Alberto said that 'he would take care of it' and 'turn it into a novelty, an article of high commercial value’.

"Levi next told how he and Alberto took their forty cerium rods, and spent three dangerous nights crouching beneath the blankets in the Buna hut, filing the rods into the shape of lighter flints for the cigarettes of important persons and civilian workers in the camp. In those three nights, they turned their forty rods into one hundred and twenty flints, and as the price of a lighter flint was roughly equivalent to a ration of bread, that meant sixty rations of bread each - two months of life.

"Levi said that if Alberto had not defeated his pessimism in the camp, they would not have made the flints to get the bread, and neither he nor Alberto would have eaten.

"Flaubert's veneration of the intrinsic pains of life, Levi explained, implied a world where individuals were governed entirely by the disappointments of their central nervous systems. This made people alone and weak and made all into strangers. It detracted from the strength which people generated between them, the strength that allowed both he and Alberto to gain their bread. Pessimism hurt other people.

"Levi said that Flaubert's beliefs were insufficient. It was not enough to make negative judgements about the nature of life, because to be alive meant also to live in the world. And to live in the world meant to be with others.

"Levi concluded. If it were a moral imperative of being in the world not to hurt others, and if a sin is a transgression of a moral imperative, then pessimism was a sin. It bred weakness and danger."

UR lastly told of the contribution of Gargantua: moi!

"Gargantua eyed both men nonchalantly in turn and said, 'Yes, you're both right. Wine?' And in this way he won stupendously.

"And so it was," Ur finished, "that Primo and Gustave were tidily beaten and chose to remain in Gargantua's castle, to enjoy the eye-watering brilliance of his mind, and the bowel-nuzzling splendours of the feasting with which he delights his worthiest dead friends."

*


"Really I only esteem two men: Rabelais and Byron, the only two who have written with the aim of attacking the human race while laughing right in its face."
Gustave Flaubert; 13th September 1838, letter to Ernest Chevalier

"In Rabelais there is no morose retreat into oneself, re-thinking, inner-searching... It would be difficult to find a single, melancholy page in all of his work, and yet Rabelais knows human misery, he is silent about it because, also a good physician when he writes, he does not accept it, he wants to heal it."
Primo Levi; 1989, Other People's Trades
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